Year 2016 in Review

Planet Earth in 2016: too rich to be poor

A Comment by Ralph T. Niemeyer, retired editor-in-chief

Let’s skip the 2015-Review. All that could happen has happend. But, 2016 has been, everyone will agree, a great year, although there was no Christmas anymore since Pope Francis predicted in 2015 that it became obsolete to celebrate it and expecially not when being so terribly commercialised. He referred to the prophesy of Saint Malachias who in 1139 wrote down the names of the next 112 occupants of the Holy Sea, ending with, well, Francis aka Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

The Holy Father put his depressing viewpoint into context. The wars, especially those self-enhanced fights like against IS, a US-made terror gang, were exhausting the planet and mankind, he said, adding that it becomes a farce to celebrate Christmas. Given the fact that even during WWII Christ’s birth had been celebrated, this connotation makes one raise the eyebrows. But, not only Christmas has been the last one of it’s kind being celebrated in 2015.
Also the Olypmics in Rio de Janeiro where the last ones to be held as Tokyo’s tap water is contaminated by nuclear substances. Rio already was no fun-games anyhow because the state was too rich to be poor and could not even put food on the table of millions of families while it could also not pay it’s civil servants and policemen to win over anarchy and crime.

The Football European World Cup also has been the final one of it’s kind as nobody really is intrigued by it anymore. Public screamings have limited appeal. Only a tiny minority is still interested no matter how much mainstream media and industries try to promote it.
Football definetly has had it one can tell and all this inflation of yet another champions leage, dingsbums cup and so on can’t delude the fact that people are more and more disenfranchised by this Bread & Circuses – fooling that reminds us of the end-phase of the Roman Empire.
Our problem in this world is not as many globalisation critics suggest too little money but rather too much. There is definetly too much money for sports.

All the doping would not take place if it was not millions that were held up as the red carrot for the winners. No sane person would risk his health or even his life for a medal and the honour alone. But, many sane athletes would compete on that basis like I myself once did when aspiring the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

Another hint that we are facing the very End can be seen in the fact that Capitalism’s prime magazine, “FORBES” has made German Chancellor Angela Merkel the most powerful woman once more. Well, with all respect, Mrs. Merkel is not even able to tell the US to stop tapping her phone, the US’ s drone war be conducted from Ramstein airbase in Germany or guaranteeing Edward Snowden safe passage to speak in front of the special investigation committee of the German Bundestag. Germany is not sovereign. Mrs. Merkel Washington’s marionette puppet. But, US-Americans know one thing: marketing is everything. Labelling another.

We also have too much money for banks and hedge funds and nobody knows how to let the superfluous liquidity out of the buble without bursting it and flooding the real economy, the good’s market but yet our ailing financial system is being kept alive by ever more artificially created money that does in no way relate to production, wages, services, goods.

But there are also some refreshing moments of truth for the establishment: the BREXIT campaign likely to win against all odds while in reality not becoming true as well as the election of potentially Donald Trump as US-president who might not govern for long or not at all, hold for a moment the arrogant media-aristocracy hostage.

When being asked in opinion polls citizens usually shrug their shoulders and gruntle their dismay of the present economic system but refuse to think outside of the box as if it amounted to blasphemy to question the legitimacy of the Masters of the Universe in Wall Street and the City. That leads us inevitably to the question whether our present growth-based economic system that leads to wanton destrcution of natural habitats, climatic calamity, war and famine in a form of a spiral pointing downwards is God-given.

Let’s think a bit about the Universe. How shall we imagine it functions in reality?
All science is a self construed illusion by human beings who cannot even explain their own existence, why they were born, how they were made, who created the biological and chemical parametres that make us unique, why is there DNA and why can we know about it?
Why are we born?
What is the soul?
Why do we die?
Is there perpetuaty?
Eternity?
To any question we pose there will be an answer, but not often a logic one.
All common theories do not provide for satisfying answers, so let’s try another one:
God is lazy like we all are.
God, if she or he exists did not create the universe within six days and also not us human beings. It took her/him only one day. In the afternoon God experimented out of a certain mood and created men and female men, with no intention to have mankind and womankind become too curious.
We started to exist out of random bio-chemical mixes and only out of curiosity started posing questions to which the universe, or God, does not have answers when we put the question but make her/him work. One can very well imagine how mind bugging it must be to be interrupted ever now and then by some human beings like a pain in the ass asking questions over questions, ultimately going on the nerves of God like 3 year olds may sometimes do when you are sitting in your armchair at the fire and want to read a good book or the bible.
“Oh Lord, is it ok to run bank guarantee scams?”, one day God was asked and looked up from her books, quickly striving with her left hand ov er her long white beard.
“Sure, go ahead, just let me watch my programme”, God replied, “just make sure there is no bank-run.”
Just when God started to regret to have given mankind and womankind a cerebral cortrex into the brain to make it a species that can reflect, another question was posed to God:
“God, is it ok that we burn the rain forests?”
“Yes, ok, do what you think you have to do but stop bothering me”, was the quick answer. Soon after that another one came up to the Lord:
“God, we have a problem.”
“What is it?”
“We run out of oxygen.”
“Ok, stop burning fossil fuel unless you can find someone prove that it can be done carbon-neutral.”
Mankind ran all over the place and found that Volkswagen AG could actually provide that proof, even in writing and with a government stamp on it.
While the sea levels were rising some thought that carbon-trade was maybe not such a good idea as one could hardly dump emissions from one side of the planet on the other, someone else thought to be even more clever and asked The Lord: “What about nuclear energy? It is emission free!” and God stared to the ceiling. “Ok, but don’t complain later that you don’t know what to do with the waste.”
That’s where we stand now and since 2016 was wasted by focussing on sports we lost it completely.
It is a fatal misconception of mankind to think that there is anybody who will fix it when things go wrong.
It is rather that this anybody is annoyed when being disturbed all the time by our stupid questions and misbehaviour.